LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Wilma Batey-Harbin keeps her son John close to her heart, his photo clipped to her shirt after her son was killed last December, one of the 80 people who were killed in Louisville last year.
"You've got too many kids running around here dead," George Fields, a community activist, said. "You've got too many mamas crying. You've got too many people hurt."
Since her son's death, Batey-Harbin has met others who have known the grief caused by violence, like Angela Renfro, a survivor of human trafficking and now the executive director of Kristy Love Foundation.
"It doesn't matter which street it happened on, what family it happened to, the main thing you got to do when this happens with anybody's child, you got to stand for them," Renfro said.
Renfro, Batey-Harbin and others say they and the children in the community have seen too much violence. In 2018, Louisville Metro Police reported 80 homicides in the Metro area.
"When God bless that child to wake up, they hear sirens. They see tape. They see dead bodies," Fields said.
"I have been to too many funerals of our young black men and other people that's in our community and I'm sick and tired of it," Rev. Leonard Boyd, the pastor at United Missionary Baptist Church, said.
Boyd and several other community leaders, including Bishop Dennis Lyons and Daniel Catch, are organizing the Mics Up Guns Down Fall Festival, which will feature musicians, comedians and other family fun. According to Boyd, this is more than just a block party as the organizers want this to serve as an example of what the community can do when it comes together.
"When you have one example that you can change your life, what it does, it plants the seed that you can watch others to grow," Renfro said.
"Jesus didn't get all of them and we're not going to get all of them, but if we can change at least one life, I feel like our labor and this movement is not in vain," Boyd said.
The Mics Up Guns Down Festival will be held on Saturday. Oct. 5 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Kentucky Street from 26th through 28th Streets.